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Navigation Services

Navigation Services, introduced in Mac OS 8.5, was Apple’s completely overhauled system of Open and Save dialogs, boasting huge improvements over the old dialogs. A comparison of the two systems is shown in the table below. The following feature list applies to the version supplied with Mac OS 9.1, so not all the features may be available in 1.1 (Mac OS 8.5) or 1.0.1 (available for PPC machines under Mac OS 8.1)

Traditional

Navigation Services

System modal – you cannot switch to another program with one open;

Open instantly when you select Open or Save;

Single click to go up a level (click the volume name at the top-right), and with the desktop visible, volumes are grouped conveniently at the top of the list

Application modal – you can switch to another program with it open; they are also movable, resizable, and remember their position and size;

On older machines, can take up to 10-15 seconds to open in some applications, due the overhead of all the new features; they are really only intended for G3 machines;

Three new tool buttons, to let you select, connect to and eject volumes, select favourite files and folders and add favourites, and select recent items; however, there is no longer a single click method to go up a level in the folder structure, and volumes no longer appear at the top of the list of desktop items (but in their alphabetical position instead) in favour of the volume button;

Finder-like folder view with disclosure triangles and the ability to sort files by name and modification date; which folders are expanded by disclosure triangles is also memorised, along with which folder you were last in, and the history of your traversals through the drive, automatically selecting the next folder in sequence as you open each one;

You can drop folders from the Finder into dialogs to have them automatically navigate to the specified folder, and for Open dialogs, you can drop a file onto the dialog too to have it navigate to that folder and highlight the specified file